Something is happening in the housing market that really shouldn’t be. Everyone familiar with America’s affordability crisis knows that it is most acute in ultra-progressive coastal cities in heavily Democratic states. And yet, home prices have been rising most sharply in the exact places that have long served as a refuge for Americans fed up with the spiraling cost of living. Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).
房地产市场正在发生某些实际上不应该这样做的事情。每个熟悉美国负担能力危机的人都知道，在民主国家的超前沿海城市中，这是最敏锐的。然而，在确切的地方，房价一直在避难所避难，因为美国人厌倦了生活成本，这是避难所。在过去的十年中，凤凰城的中位房价上涨了134％，迈阿密的133％，亚特兰大的129％，达拉斯的99％上涨。（在同一范围内，纽约，旧金山和洛杉矶的价格分别上涨了约75％，76％和97％）。
This trend could prove disastrous. For much of the past half century, suburban sprawl across the Sun Belt was a kind of pressure-release valve for the housing market. People who couldn’t afford to live in expensive cities had other, cheaper places to go. Now even the affordable alternatives are on track to become out of reach for a critical mass of Americans.
这种趋势可能证明是灾难性的。在过去半个世纪的大部分时间里，郊区遍布太阳带是房屋市场的一种压力释放阀。那些负担不起居住在昂贵城市的人还有其他便宜的地方。现在，即使是负担得起的替代方案也有望成为大量美国人的差距。
The trend also presents a mystery. According to expert consensus, anti-growth liberals have imposed excessive regulations that made building enough homes impossible. The housing crisis has thus become synonymous with feckless blue-state governance. So how can prices now be rising so fast in red and purple states known for their loose regulations?
趋势也提出了一个谜。根据专家的共识，反成长的自由主义者施加了过多的法规，这使得不可能建造足够的房屋。因此，住房危机已成为无情的蓝州治理的代名词。那么，以红色和紫色状态以其宽松的法规而闻名的红色和紫色国家现在如何上涨呢？
From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream
从2025年3月的问题开始：进步者如何冻结美国梦
A tempting explanation is that the expert consensus is wrong. Perhaps regulations and NIMBYism were never really the problem, and the current push to reform zoning laws and building codes is misguided. But the real answer is that San Francisco and New York weren’t unique—they were just early. Eventually, no matter where you are, the forces of NIMBYism catch up to you.
一个诱人的解释是专家共识是错误的。也许法规和敏捷性从来都不是真正的问题，目前的改革分区法律和建筑法规的推动被误导了。但是真正的答案是，旧金山和纽约并不是独一无二的，他们还早。最终，无论您身在何处，灵活的力量都赶上了您。
The perception of the Sun Belt as the anti-California used to be accurate. In a recent paper, two urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Gyourko, analyze the rate of housing production across 82 metro areas since the 1950s. They find that as recently as the early 2000s, booming cities such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix were building new homes at more than four times the rate of major coastal cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, on average. The fact that millions of people were being priced out of the locations with the best jobs and highest wages—so-called superstar cities—wasn’t ideal. But the Sun Belt building boom kept the coastal housing shortage from becoming a full-blown national crisis.
对太阳带作为反加利福尼亚的感知过去是准确的。在最近的一篇论文中，两位城市经济学家埃德·格莱瑟（Ed Glaeser）和乔·乔尔科（Joe Gyourko）分析了自1950年代以来82个都会区的住房产量率。他们发现，直到2000年代初，达拉斯，亚特兰大和凤凰城等蓬勃发展的城市正平均建造了主要沿海城市（例如旧金山，洛杉矶和纽约）的四倍以上。数以百万计的人的价格最高的工作和最高工资（如此被称为超级巨星城市）的事实并不理想。但是，太阳带大楼的繁荣使沿海住房短缺无法成为全国危机。
No longer. Although the Sun Belt continues to build far more housing than the coasts in absolute terms, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the rate of building in most Sun Belt cities has fallen by more than half over the past 25 years, in some cases by much more, even as demand to live in those places has surged. “When it comes to new housing production, the Sun Belt cities today are basically at the point that the big coastal cities were 20 years ago,” Gyourko told me. This explains why home prices in the Sun Belt, though still low compared with those in San Francisco and New York, have risen so sharply since the mid-2010s—a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as the rise of remote work led to a large migration out of high-cost cities.
不再。尽管在绝对方面，太阳带的建造远比海岸要多得多，但Glaeser和Gyourko发现，在过去25年中，大多数太阳带城市的建筑物速度在过去25年中跌幅超过一半以上，在某些情况下，即使在这些地方的需求也越来越多。盖尔科告诉我：“在新的住房生产方面，今天的太阳腰城基本上是在20年前的大沿海城市。”这就解释了为什么与旧金山和纽约的房价相比仍然很低，但自2010年代中期以来，旧金山和纽约的房价仍然如此急剧上升，这种趋势在大流行期间加速了，因为远程工作的兴起导致了高度ost城市的大规模迁移。
In a properly functioning housing market, the post-COVID surge in demand should have generated a massive building boom that would have cooled price growth. Instead, more than five years after the pandemic began, these places still aren’t building enough homes, and prices are still rising wildly.
在正常运作的住房市场中，需求后的激增应该产生巨大的建筑繁荣，这将使价格增长降低。取而代之的是，大流行开始后的五年多，这些地方仍然没有建造足够的房屋，而且价格仍在疯狂上涨。
As the issue of housing has become more salient in Democratic Party politics, some commentators have pointed to rising costs in the supposedly laissez-faire Sun Belt as proof that zoning laws and other regulations are not the culprit. “Blaming zoning for housing costs seems especially blinkered because different jurisdictions in the United States have very different approaches to land use regulations, and yet the housing crisis is a nationwide phenomenon,” the Vanderbilt University law professors Ganesh Sitaraman and Christopher Serkin write in a recent paper. Some argue that the wave of consolidation within the home-building industry following the 2008 financial crisis gave large developers the power to slow-walk development and keep prices high. Others say that the cost of construction has climbed so high over the past two decades that building no longer makes financial sense for developers.
随着在民主党政治中的住房问题变得越来越突出，一些评论员指出，据称是自由放任的太阳带的成本上升，以证明分区法律和其他法规不是罪魁祸首。范德比尔特大学法学教授甘尼什·西塔拉曼（Ganesh Sitaraman）和克里斯托弗·塞尔金（Christpher Serkin）在最近的一篇论文中写道：“将分区归咎于住房成本似乎尤其眨眼，因为美国不同的司法管辖区具有截然不同的土地使用法规，但住房危机是一种全国性的现象。”有人认为，在2008年的金融危机之后，在房屋建设行业内的合并浪潮赋予了大型开发商的慢速发展和保持高价的力量。其他人则说，在过去的二十年中，建设成本的攀升如此之高，以至于建筑对开发人员不再具有财务意义。
Both of those claims probably account for part of the growth in housing costs, but they fall short as the main explanation. The home-building industry has indeed become more concentrated since 2008, but the slowdown in housing production in the Sun Belt began well before that. If the problem were a monopolistic market, you would expect to see higher profit margins for builders, yet Glaeser and Gyourko find that developer profits have remained roughly constant. (Other sources agree.) Likewise, construction and financing costs have risen sharply since the early 2000s—but not to the point where builders can’t turn a profit. In fact, Glaeser and Gyourko find that the share of homes selling far above the cost of production in major Sun Belt markets has dramatically increased. Put another way, there are even more opportunities for home builders to make a profit in these places; something is preventing them from taking advantage.
这两种说法都可能解释了住房成本增长的一部分，但它们是主要解释。自2008年以来，房屋建设行业确实变得更加集中，但是在此之前，太阳带的住房产量放缓开始了。如果问题是一个垄断市场，您会期望看到建筑商的利润率更高，但是Glaeser和Gyourko发现开发人员的利润仍然大致稳定。（其他消息来源同意。）同样，自2000年代初以来，建筑和融资成本也急剧上升，但不是建造者无法兑现利润的地步。实际上，格拉瑟（Glaeser）和朱尔科（Gyourko）发现，卖出的房屋份额远高于主要太阳带市场的生产成本，这显着增加了。换句话说，房屋建筑商有更多的机会在这些地方获利。有些事情阻止他们利用。
The Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them. Cities in the South and Southwest have portrayed themselves as business-friendly, pro-growth metros. In reality, their land-use laws aren’t so different from those in blue-state cities. According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. “When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,” Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. “It’s almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.”
简而言之，太阳带具有与海岸相同的反感染力量。触发它们花了更长的时间。南部和西南部的城市将自己描绘成企业友好的，亲培养的都市。实际上，他们的土地利用法与蓝州城市的法律没有什么不同。根据Gyourko共同创作的2018年研究论文，该论文对44个美国大都市区域，迈阿密和凤凰城的土地利用法规排名最高的十大最限制性（仅次于华盛顿特区，落后于华盛顿特区，以及在波士顿和纳什维尔（Dallas）和纳什维尔（Nashville）的情况下，这是在最高的25次响应。太阳皮带是。“当我第一次为亚特兰大开放分区代码时，我几乎吐了咖啡，”中心智囊团Niskanen Center的高级住房政策分析师Alex Armlovich告诉我。“这与洛杉矶在1990年代几乎相同。”
These restrictive rules weren’t a problem back when Sun Belt cities could expand by building new single-family homes at their exurban fringes indefinitely. That kind of development is less likely to be subject to zoning laws; even when it is, obtaining exceptions to those laws is relatively easy because neighbors who might oppose new development don’t exist yet. Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they’ve run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they’ve already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. “This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and ’90s,” Armlovich told me. “Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.”
当太阳腰带城市可以无限期地建造新的单户住宅来扩大新的单户住宅时，这些限制性规则并不是一个问题。这种发展不太可能受到分区法律的影响。即使是这样，获得这些法律的例外也相对容易，因为可能反对新发展的邻居还不存在。然而，最近，许多太阳带城市已经开始对它们的外向蔓延，要么是因为它们已经遇到了自然障碍（例如迈阿密的大沼泽地和凤凰城附近的部落土地），要么是因为它们已经扩展到了合理的通勤距离的边缘（在亚特兰大和达拉斯似乎是这种情况）。为了继续增长，这些城市将不得不寻找方法来提高其现有城市核心和郊区的密度。这是一个更加困难的主张。“这正是1980年代和90年代许多沿海城市发生的事情，” Armlovich告诉我。“一旦您用完了膨胀的空间，突然，分区代码开始成为一个真正的限制。”
Jerusalem Demsas: The labyrinthine rules that created a housing crisis
耶路撒冷Demsas：造成住房危机的迷宫规则
Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. “We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,” Gyourko told me. “That clearly isn’t the case.”
Glaeser和Gyourko更进一步。他们假设，随着太阳带城市变得越来越富裕和受过高等教育，他们的居民变得越来越愿意，并能够使用现有的法律法规来阻止新的发展。他们指出了两个主要证据。首先，对于一个给定的城市，新住房开发的放缓与受过大学教育的居民的份额不断增长密切相关。其次，在城市内，住房生产放缓的社区最低的密度是较低的，富裕的郊区，那里有相对富裕，受过良好教育的专业人士。换句话说，反成长的敏捷可能是一个不正当的增长的不正当但自然的结果：随着生活在某个地方的需求增加，它吸引了那些更有可能反对新发展并且有时间和资源的人。盖尔科告诉我：“我们曾经认为，迈阿密，达拉斯，凤凰城的行为与波士顿和旧金山的人的行为不同。”“显然不是这样。”
Real-world examples aren’t hard to find. In early 2024, an affordable-housing developer proposed a project for an 85-unit apartment building in an affluent suburb of San Antonio. The apartments would have consisted entirely of subsidized units reserved for low-income residents, and the building would have included an on-site preschool. The project had buy-in from the city government, but a handful of local residents opposed it, citing concerns such as traffic, crime, and the height of the building. “It’s too much—we’re turning into Houston,” one nearby resident told the planning commission in April. “I would appreciate if you all would keep San Antonio residential and feeling like home.”
现实世界并不难找到。2024年初，一个负担得起的房屋开发商提出了一个在富裕的圣安东尼奥郊区的85个单元公寓楼的项目。这些公寓将完全由为低收入居民保留的补贴单元组成，该建筑物将包括现场学前班。该项目从市政府提供了买入，但少数当地居民反对该项目，理由是交通，犯罪和建筑物的高处。附近的一位居民在4月对计划委员会说：“太多了 - 我们变成了休斯顿。”“如果大家都会保留圣安东尼奥的住宅，并且感觉像家一样，我会很感激。”
Those residents took advantage of a 1927 Texas law known as the “valid petition,” a procedure originally introduced as a way to preserve segregation after the Supreme Court struck down explicitly racial zoning. Under the law, any effort by a developer to get an exemption from a zoning ordinance (say, to build apartments on land zoned for retail) can be blocked if the owners of just 20 percent of the land within 200 feet of the proposed project site file a petition opposing the effort. At that point, the only way to rescue the project is to summon a three-fourths supermajority vote by the city council. In San Antonio, that meant nine of the city’s 11 council members would need to vote to overturn the valid petition. In the end, only seven did. The project was killed.
那些居民利用了1927年的德克萨斯州法律，称为“有效请愿书”，这是一种最初引入的程序，是一种在最高法院明确地进行了种族分区的方式，以保存种族隔离的一种方法。根据法律，如果开发商豁免分区条例的任何努力（例如，在零售土地上建造公寓），如果仅20％的土地所有者在拟议的项目地点的200英尺内只有20％的土地所有者提出了反对这项工作的请愿书。那时，救出该项目的唯一方法是召集市议会的四分之三超级投票。在圣安东尼奥市，这意味着该市11名理事会成员中有9名需要投票推翻有效的请愿书。最后，只有七个做到了。该项目被杀。
Experts told me that from the mid-20th century through the 2000s, valid petitions were hardly used in Texas. But in recent years they have become such a common way to kill new projects that they have earned the nickname “the tyrant’s veto.” They have been wielded against, among other things, a hospital expansion in Dallas, student housing in Bryan, and Habitat for Humanity houses in Austin. According to Nicole Nosek, the chair and founder of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a pro-housing advocacy organization, the law chills development before it even gets proposed in the first place. “Developers call it ‘the silent killer,’” Nosek told me. “Many of them don’t even try to propose projects in places like East Austin, because they know that one person could stir up enough trouble to kill it altogether.”
专家告诉我，从20世纪中叶到2000年代，得克萨斯州几乎没有使用有效的请愿书。但是近年来，它们已成为杀死新项目的一种普遍方法，以至于他们获得了“暴君的否决权”的绰号。除其他外，他们还反对在达拉斯的医院扩建，布莱恩的学生住房以及奥斯丁人的人居栖息地。据支持的倡导组织，得克萨斯州的主席兼创始人妮可·霍尼克（Nicole Nosek）说，该法律甚至首先提出了提议。“开发人员称其为'沉默的杀手'，” Nosek告诉我。“他们中的许多人甚至都没有试图在东奥斯丁等地方提出项目，因为他们知道一个人可能会激起足够的麻烦来完全杀死它。”
Justin Webb, the owner of a small family-owned home-building business in Dallas, told me that when he started out in 1990, the local environment was “every builder’s dream.” Not anymore. “Now everything is a negotiation; everything is a process,” Webb said. He cited a project first proposed in May 2022 to turn a run-down strip mall in North Dallas into a mixed-use development with 2,300 new housing units alongside offices, retail, walking paths, and green space. After three years of local opposition and several contentious community meetings, the proposal has been scaled back to just 868 units. And it faces a lawsuit filed by a local neighborhood association that might kill it altogether. “A lot of times, the last person to move in wants to close the door and throw away the key,” Webb said. “I think that’s what’s happening all over Texas right now.”
贾斯汀·韦伯（Justin Webb）是达拉斯（Dallas）一家小型家族建设业务的所有者，他告诉我，当他于1990年开始时，当地环境是“每个建筑商的梦想”。不再。韦伯说：“现在一切都是谈判；一切都是一个过程。”他列举了一项在2022年5月首次提议的项目，将北达拉斯的破产购物中心转变为综合开发项目，并与办公室，零售，步行道和绿色空间一起，有2300个新的住房单元。经过三年的当地反对派和几次有争议的社区会议，该提案已被扩展到868个单位。它面临当地社区协会提起的诉讼，可能会完全杀死它。韦伯说：“很多时候，最后一个搬进去的人想关上门并扔掉钥匙。”“我认为这就是现在在得克萨斯州正在发生的事情。”
Texas isn’t an outlier. Similar anecdotes abound in cities such as Orlando, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. This trend has turned some of the most developer-friendly cities into absolute nightmares for home builders.
德克萨斯州不是一个异常值。在奥兰多，拉斯维加斯，凤凰城，阿尔伯克基和亚特兰大等城市中，类似的轶事比比皆是。这种趋势将一些最开发者的城市变成了房屋建筑商的绝对噩梦。
Olga Khazan: Why people won’t stop moving to the Sun Belt
奥尔加·哈赞：为什么人们不会停止搬到阳光腰带
When Mike Vasquez began working for his family’s Arizona-based construction business in the 1980s, he told me, he could walk into the local planning office with a proposal “written on a napkin” and get approval for a new project within hours. Today, that process requires navigating an agonizing thicket of paperwork, regulations, town-hall meetings, neighborhood resistance, and potential lawsuits. Simply breaking ground on a new project can take years, if it gets approved at all. “It used to be the case that if you owned a piece of land, you could just build on it,” Vasquez told me. “Now it takes a year or two just to get the land rezoned so I can start a project. You can’t run a business like that.” So after 43 years of building homes out West, Vasquez has decided to pull up stakes and move across the country to North Carolina, where he has heard it’s still possible to build like in the good old days.
当迈克·瓦斯克斯（Mike Vasquez）在1980年代开始为他家庭的亚利桑那州建筑业务工作时，他告诉我，他可以通过“写在餐巾纸上”的建议进入当地的计划办公室，并在数小时内获得一个新项目的批准。如今，这一过程需要在痛苦的文书工作，法规，镇上会议，邻里抵抗和潜在诉讼中导航。如果获得批准，那么在一个新项目上仅仅打破了新项目可能需要数年。瓦斯克斯告诉我：“过去，如果您拥有一块土地，就可以在它上建造。”“现在需要一两年的时间才能重新分区土地，以便我可以开始一个项目。您不能经营这样的业务。”因此，在西部建造了43年的房屋之后，Vasquez决定拉起赌注并在全国各地移动到北卡罗来纳州，在那里他听说仍然有可能在过去的美好时光中建造。
Right now, the same story is playing out again and again across the Sun Belt: Eventually, suburban sprawl runs its course, and cities must face both the restrictiveness of their own land-use laws and the seemingly universal human tendency to put down roots and then oppose new development. If current trends continue, then in 20 years, the housing crisis in cities such as Miami, Phoenix, and Atlanta will be as severe as it is in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York today.
目前，同一故事正在一次又一次地播放太阳腰带：最终，郊区的蔓延开展了自己的过程，城市必须面对自己土地利用法的限制，以及看似普遍的人类倾向的趋势，即放下根源，然后反对新的发展。如果目前的趋势继续下去，那么在20年内，迈阿密，凤凰城和亚特兰大等城市的住房危机将与今天的洛杉矶，旧金山和纽约一样严重。
The good news is that these cities have been warned. They can look at the crisis plaguing their coastal counterparts, see into their not-so-far-off future, and choose to do something about it. Some already have. In 2021, Raleigh, North Carolina, responded to an influx of new residents by reforming its laws to make building multifamily housing much easier. Over the next three years, the city built 60 percent more units annually and experienced half the rental-cost growth than it had during the previous five years, according to data gathered by Alex Horowitz, the project director for housing policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts.
好消息是这些城市已被警告。他们可以看一下困扰着沿海对应物的危机，看到他们不太明显的未来，然后选择对此做些事情。有些已经有。2021年，北卡罗来纳州的罗利（Raleigh）通过改革其法律，使建筑物的多户住房更加容易，对新居民的涌入作出了回应。根据Pew Charitable Trusts的住房政策总监Alex Horowitz收集的数据，在接下来的三年中，该市每年建造的单位每年增加60％，并经历了一半的租金增长。
The forces opposed to new development are just as vehemently opposed to the kind of reforms needed to avert a future crisis. Many local and state governments across the Sun Belt have tried and failed to implement lasting pro-housing reforms. But the recent spike in home prices across the region has put even more pressure on lawmakers to act. The Texas legislature recently passed several pieces of legislation that will, among other things, reduce the minimum lot size of new homes, limit the power of the “tyrant’s veto,” and allow multifamily housing to be built on land currently zoned for offices and retail. Red states like to portray themselves as free from the pathologies that have made housing such a problem in other parts of the country. Now they have an opportunity to prove it.
反对新发展的力量强烈反对避免未来危机所需的改革。太阳带的许多地方和州政府都尝试并未能实施持久的亲居住改革。但是，最近该地区房价的高涨给立法者带来了更大的压力。德克萨斯州立法机关最近通过了几项立法，除其他外，这些立法将减少新房屋的最小批量，限制“暴君的否决权”的权力，并允许在目前用于办公室和零售的土地上建造多户住房。红色州喜欢将自己描绘成摆脱使住房成为该国其他地区的病理学的。现在他们有机会证明这一点。
